D&D General Give One Piece of DMing Advice

[Eis]

A lot of people are giving good advice in this thread. I especially like the posts encouraging DM's to be flexible and willing to improvise off of what the characters are doing.

So I will add this. Write everything down. Take notes.

I am DM'ing a campaign for my son and his friends and I have some serious gaps in town names, NPC names and general geography of the world etc. I don't think anyone has caught on yet but.....its coming

 

[Lanefan]

Clarify your pizza preferences before the players order it, rather than vengefully TPK them after the pineapple-buffalo-sardine pizza arrives.

I don't vengefully TPK them after the pizzas arrive, largely because I've already vengefully TPKed them for taking three hours of game time to decide what they bloody want on them, and where to order from.

 

[Lanefan]

Don't prepare a detailed world, filled with politics, religions, cultural beliefs, a unique calendar, etc. That is the best way to put yourself in a corner and lock the campaign. Choose a small location to start with and build around that with the input from your player choices.

Having done the exact opposite of all of this for my current long-standing campaign, I beg to differ. That said, each approach has its ups and downs and IMO the only way to learn what works for you is, unfortunately, some trial and error.

What I will say is to always leave lots of blank space on the maps*. Sure that looks like an endless forest, that's only because you don't know what's out there yet.

* - this is my primary complaint with the per-edition development of Forgotten Realms: the 1e version had tons of nice blank areas on the maps but by the time even the 3e version came around many of those blank areas had been silted up with canon.

 

[LordEntrails]

Don't sweat the small stuff.

Small inconsistencies are often unknown to the players, or they simple add realism to the settings since no character ever has perfect knowledge of the world and events they are involved in. Don't worry about rule edge cases, it doesn't matter, stay consistent with how you intend the rules to work and the players will follow along.

Don't sweat the small stuff. Keep the game moving and the story flowing.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

One? Ok...

"Don't build encounters/adventures to the PC's specifics".
What that means is don't refrain from putting in flying monsters if nobody in the party can fly or has missile weapons...or don't refrain from putting in a magical locked door that requires a Knock (or similar) spell to bypass simply because the party is all fighters and thieves.

It's NOT your job as DM to "cater the world to fit the PC's strengths and weaknesses". You can, but from a players perspective (mine, at least), it feels like I'm being babysitted (babysat? babysit?... ? ). Your job is to present a believable fantasy world/setting in a consistent manner that lets the Players play in it "believably", without meta-gaming. If the Ogre Forest has ogres in it, don't suddenly only have random encounters in it be limited to "goblins, kobolds and giant rats"...because later when the PC's are higher level and suddenly encounter nothing but multiple ogres, trolls and giants in the same forest...well, you just shot your credibility as a consistent DM and totally obliterated any believabiliy of your world; congratulations, you're now running a Computer RPG but without the cool visual graphics and sound.

To put it another way...it's not your job to keep the PC's alive. Let the players do that. If they want their 1st level group of 3 to travel straight through Ogre Forest, even when others warn them not to because of, well, all the ogres, let the chips fall where they may. Not your problem.

That's my advice. "There are 5 PC's of about 6th level"...that's the ENTIRETY of what I need to know when writing an adventure or dungeon-delve for them. Their PC's races, skills, spells, equipment, etc....don't care. The world they live in doesn't care...why should I?

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Reynard]

A lot of people are giving good advice in this thread. I especially like the posts encouraging DM's to be flexible and willing to improvise off of what the characters are doing.

So I will add this. Write everything down. Take notes.

I am DM'ing a campaign for my son and his friends and I have some serious gaps in town names, NPC names and general geography of the world etc. I don't think anyone has caught on yet but.....its coming

I pay my players in XP to take notes for me.

 

[JeffB]

Stay off the internet

 

[Quickleaf]

Think of the character sheet as a menu – it informs the DM what the players want in the game.

 

[haakon1]

An NPC/monster doesn't know "I'm not important". Give them motivation … maybe history if you have time … or make it up as you play and PC interaction or dice rolls/combat results give you inspiration.

That way, you can build the world, and give the players something "real" to interact with and build their stories.

The whole game is stories … dice and rules are just to ground the story in a shared "reality".

 

[Th3g0dc0mp13x]

Communicate with your players.
In game, out of game, while your players are taking a smoke break or stuffing their face before the session. Scheduling issues, players not liking their characters, rules interactions, ideas for quests, just talking to your players about these things for 1-2 minutes can make a campaign run 1000x better.